ABSTRACT
This chapter provides the theoretical basis for the discussion and analysis that constitute the book. It starts with insights from the political and economic philosophy of Karl Marx and ends with new approaches in applied linguistics devoted to the relations between language and political economy. First of all, it discusses textbooks through the ideas of classical Marxism, the Frankfurt school and Critical Pedagogy. Second, neoliberalism is defined as a global class project that shapes political economy and ideology worldwide and also as the norm of our existence. This is followed by a presentation of relevant studies about real-world language problems from an interdisciplinary perspective that place neoliberalism at the center of the research. The chapter concludes with a call to a turn to political economy in the study of phenomena related to language teaching.
